The value of Bitcoin ballooned over the weekend, sitting just under $200 per coin

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Recently, Bitcoin has surged back into the forefront of the news cycle, due in large part to the value of a single BTC rising to never-before-reached heights. As of just one week ago, a single BTC was worth a little under one hundred dollars, sitting at $92 per coin. A hot topic making the value of something rise is inherent to the very notion of a hot topic, so once the news broke that one coin you could get for “free” was worth a Benjamin, people took notice. Since that news broke, the value of a Bitcoin has risen dramatically, resting around the $140 mark only a handful of days ago, reaching just under the $190 mark today.

At the time of writing, a single Bitcoin is worth around $188. However, there are some other interesting statistics to monitor if the current Bitcoin craze has taken hold of you. In order to mine for Bitcoins, you can set up a solo rig, or join a pool — a collective of people that break up the mining share into smaller portions, then combine their mining work into a single entity when completed; on a basic level, similar to how torrents work. The metric used to defined the strength of a mining operating is a hash, with the usual prefixes — kilo, mega, giga, and so on. For reference, an acceptable solo rig that isn’t specifically built to mine for BTC — for example, a gaming computer you built for around $800 to $1000 — will hover around one gigahash (assuming you’re mining with compatible graphics cards). At the moment, the collective power being contributed to mining for BTC is a little under 65,000 gigahashes per second. The total power being used to mine for coins is sitting at around 1.6 megawatts.

A basic “rule,” so to speak, about Bitcoin is that when 21 million BTC are in circulation, no more will be mined. Whether or not you can trust that, it’s worth noting that we’re around halfway there, with a little over 10.99 million coins out in the wild. At the current value of a single BTC, that makes about 2.077 billion dollars worth of BTC floating around the digital currency space.

If you want to get a feel for the BTC landscape — the value of a coin, if people are buying and selling, how much they’re trading for, and so on — you can check out the very detailed charts available over at the appropriately named Bitcoin Charts. However, if you like your barrage of numbers minimal and being updated in real-time in a large font flying across your screen, you can head over here to Realtime Bitcoin, which tracks the value of a single coin, the cumulative worth of the transactions taking place since you loaded the page, how many BTC are out in the wild, and how much power is being used to mine for the digital pseudo currency.